To name a few: Sperm whales can hold their breath for an hour, the most venomous animal on Earth is a snail, and tiny freshwater hydras can live so long they may as well be immortal.

But for each surprisingly true assertion about animals, there’s invariably another that’s exaggerated, misguided, or just plain wrong.

Here are a handful of the most popular myths about animals and the truth behind them – or the closest thing we have to it.

MYTH: Beaver butt secretions are in your vanilla ice cream and other foods.

(Flickr)

You’ve probably heard that a secretion called castoreum, isolated from the anal gland of a beaver, is used in flavourings and perfumes.

But castoreum is so expensive, at up to US$70 per pound of anal gland (the cost to humanely milk castoreum from a beaver is likely even higher), that it’s unlikely to show up in anything you eat.

In 2011, the Vegetarian Resource Group wrote to five major companies that produce vanilla flavoring and asked if they use castoreum. The answer: According to the Federal Code of Regulations, they can’t. (The FDA highly regulates what goes into vanilla flavoring and extracts.)

Chimps and humans share uncanny similarities, not the least of which is our DNA – about 98.8 percent is identical.

However, evolution works as incremental genetic changes add up through many generations. Chimps and humans did share a common ancestor between 6 and 8 million years ago but a lot has changed since then.

Modern chimps evolved into a separate (though close) branch of the ape family tree.

This one is a big exaggeration. Jaws is not coming for you from across the ocean if you bleed in the water.

Shark have a highly enlarged brain region for smelling odours, allowing some of the fish to detect as little as 1 part blood per 10 billion parts water – roughly a drop in an Olympic-size swimming pool.

But it the ocean is much, much, much bigger and it takes a while for odor molecules to drift. On a very good day when the currents are favourable, a shark can smell its prey from a few football fields away – not miles.

To debunk this one, researchers closely monitored a herd of five adult and three young giraffes for 152 days, counting all of their naps and deep sleeps. The animals typically slept overnight and napped in the afternoon (sound familiar?).

Before April 2012, Starbucks’ strawberry Frappuccino contained a dye made from the ground-up bodies of thousands of tiny insects, called cochineal bugs or Dactylopius coccus.

Farmers in South and Central America make a living harvesting (and pulverising) the bugs that go into the dye. Their crushed bodies produce a deep red ink that is used as a natural food colouring, which was “called cochineal” red but is now called “carmine colour.”

Starbucks stopped using carmine colour in their strawberry Frappuccinos in 2012. But the dye is still used in thousands of other food products – from Nerds candies to grapefruit juice. Not to mention cosmetics, like lovely shades of red lipstick.

The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, almost certainly didn’t jump to humans through human-monkey sex.

Based on the virus’ genetic similarity to a strain of simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, that infects chimpanzees, most experts think the virus jumped to humans through hunting primates for bush-meat food.

This interaction may have led to blood-to-blood contact – perhaps through an open cut on the hunter – and the transfer of a new strain that could silently infect people.

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